Apple may have discontinued the venerable iPod Classic, but it still has its fans, for its click wheel design and capacious storage. Now you can keep yours going and bring it into the flash storage age, too.
This isn't a review — I can't find my iPod Classic at the moment, though I plan to tear my house apart looking for it, but a recent Twitter post from Other World Computing got my attention and I thought you ought to know. Turns out the company offers a DIY kit called the iFlash, which enables you to replace the tiny internal hard drive in your iPod Classic with an SDHC or SDXC flash media card.
With OWC iFlash, you can get up to a massive 128GB of capacity and store your music, movies and photos on non-volatile flash memory with faster access times and better skip protection than the original HDD that originally came with your iPod.
Taking apart an iPod Classic isn't a simple job, but it's something a lot of iPod owners have done over the years, to replace batteries and hard drives and other parts that have worn out.
It's available with or without a card; without, it costs $49 plus shipping. With, it's $99.
Obviously you can get an iPod touch if you prefer, but Apple's still limiting capacity on that model to 64 GB. You can double that with an SDXC card. Larger cards than 128 GB are available, of course, but some iPod Classics have software limitations that will prevent larger ones from being used. Either way, you'll end up with an iPod that works even better than the original.
